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Comic Trouble

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If US President George Washington's motto was 'I cannot tell a lie', the Indian government's must be 'I cannot take a joke'. Cartoonist Aseem Trivedi was arrested in Mumbai on Sunday for his 'offensive' sketch in which he lampooned the government and national emblem, by replacing the three lions with wolves. Here are some other cases where the government found cartoons too much to take....

Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) chief Vaiko had first raised the issue about the cartoons, writing to Kapil Sibal stating that the illustrations were 'a total distortion of history and hurts the sentiments of the people of Tamil Nadu, maligning the historic Dravidian movement'. They have demanded that the sketch, created by noted cartoonist RK Laxman, be removed from the textbooks.

The West Bengal police arrested a Jadavpur University chemistry professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, for circulating a cartoon that poked fun at Mamata Banerjee (in pic) and railway minister Mukul Roy. Other ministers in Banerjee's government supported the police action, saying that the email was in bad taste, but in Soviet Bengal, did you really have any option to say otherwise? Photo: PTI

After a cartoon on Dr B R Ambedkar making slow progress on framing the Constitution in a NCERT textbook led to widespread protests and rocked Parliament, HRD minister Sibal was forced to apologize and placate offended parties by assuring them that such incidents would not happen again. Sibal's sense of humour is suspect anyway, since it was he who suggested that social networking sites censor content before it is uploaded after finding 'objectionable' content online that poked fun at Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. Photo: AP